Examine The Reasons For Family Diversity

Joe Hack – 22/10/14Sociology EssayExamine the reasons for the increased family and household diversity in the last 40 years. (24 marks)Functionalists believe that the modern family can be generalised to a ‘cereal packet image’ – named because of the way that the media portray the typical family that consists of two parents, one male and one female, and then two or three children. However, there is now a strong body of evidence to suggest that there are now a wider variety of family types, which shows that there has been an increase in diversity within the family. There are numerous reasons for an increase in family and household diversity over the past 40 years. One reason being is that there has been a huge change in the amount of marriages
One of the main contributors to this statistic is that people tend to be delaying marriage until later in life which is evident because the average age of first marriage has risen by over 7 years from 1971 to 2005. The reason for this is because people are taking the chance to stay in education or settle down with a full time job, rather than committing straight away to marriages. Another reason that families are becoming more diverse is because of secularisation; this is where religion has less of an influence on the way people make decisions within society. Prior to the post-modern society, the ‘norm’ played a key part in society and therefore family types that were not nuclear where tended to be frowned upon. However, now-a-days, the reason for people being less influenced by their culture is because now in a post-modern society, people have more freedom and therefore the ability to make their own decisions. This change in decision making has allowed family types such as reconstituted and one person families to flourish because people did not feel pressured into things they didn’t want to do, so therefore did whatever made them happy. Family and household diversity has also increased because of a cohort
However it then changed again in the year 2000’s when employment started to increase, therefore meaning that people could live on their own and not have to rely on other people for financial and emotional backing, they could be more independent which would encourage a single-person household.Family diversity is something that by some people could be considered as a good thing, but by others a bad thing. Views that see family diversity as a good thing is the post-modernist view. This post-modern view is however disagreed with by Functionalists theories and New Right theories. Firstly, functionalists believe that family diversity is a bad thing in society. For example, Robert Chester see’s family diversity as a bad thing because in his eyes, the nuclear family is most important and due to diversity, the nuclear family rate is decreasing. However Chester does recognise that traditional nuclear family has been changed into a more neo-conventional family in which both spouses go out to work and the division of labour is more equal and shared. Chester argues that ‘family diversity’ is being exaggerated and it is more about lifecycle than people choosing the type of family they want to be in. He believes that everybody still aspires to be in a nuclear